Abigail Dean Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Abigail Dean
Abigail Dean is a writer that is from Manchester and lives in South London. She grew up in the Peak District, and graduated from Cambridge with a Double First in English.

During her childhood, she wrote all the time, getting into fan fiction when she was a teen (Final Fantasy stuff, as she was a huge gamer during this time). However after she got into Cambridge, where she studied English literature, Abigail felt much too daunted to continue. The creative writing scene was much too intimidating and something that she felt that she was not good enough for.

Once a Waterstones bookseller, she worked for five years as a lawyer in London, and took the summer of 2018 off in order to work on her first novel, Girl A, before her thirtieth birthday. She felt that this job was using all of the oxygen up in her life, and that if she didn’t make a change, she would still be working there by the time she turned forty. The job was very much a 24/7 job, as she was traveling a bunch for her job, doing some incredibly long hours. Taking the time off was in part to help her recover. She just wanted to return writing, the thing that she loved, and see what happened for her.

She took a total of three months off, and wrote every day at Dulwich library in London, and she wound up with the seeds of what later become her debut. However it would take another year for her to finish up the first draft of the novel, during this time she began a new job at Google as a lawyer that gave her weekends and the evenings off to chip away at her story. It provided her with a great balance. She fell back in love with working, and she got to write, something that made her deeply happy as well.

Abigail quite liked the 25 minute walk to Dulwich library as well as the idea of a routine, however she had to get a lot less precious about writing once she started at Google. She wrote the second half of the novel in her flat’s spare bedroom, or on the notes section of her phone while on the subway or on buses.

Since she is a follower of true crime, she pulled inspiration from a number of real life cases, from serial killers Rosemary and Fred West to a more recent case like Louise and David Turpin. She also read about a teen that swam across a lake in Minnesota after she was held captive for a month. From these cases, along with some other ones, Abigail saw the power that teen girls had to escape and be incredibly strong the entire time. This was something she was looking to think about when it comes to Lex, her intelligence and resilience in the face of her devastating experiences.

Abigail was an only child, growing up in the village of Hayfield in Derbyshire, and she has always been interest in sisters and brothers. She was hoping to capture the chemistry that siblings have, as Lex has a vastly different relationship with each one of her siblings, for worse or for better. She researched just how the experience of captivity could affect each Gracie kid in different ways, and she considered how she could have reacted herself.

“Girl A” sold in the United Kingdom following a nine way auction, and it also sold at auction in the United States. After that, it was acquired in a total of 27 other territories.

Abigail’s first novel, “Girl A” was released in the United Kingdom in early 2021 and was instantly a Sunday Times Bestseller. The novel was hailed as a Best New Book of 2021 by LitHub, O Magazine, Redbook, Marie Claire, Good Housekeeping, and Woman’s Day.

“Girl A” is the first stand alone novel and was released in the year 2021. She believed that she had escaped from her past. However there are just some things you cannot outrun.

The last thing that Lex Gracie wants to think about is her family. She has no interest in thinking about growing up in her parents’ House of Horrors. Nor does she want to think about her identity as Girl A: the girl that escaped, the oldest sister that freed her four younger siblings and older brother. It has been easy enough to avoid her parents, as her dad never made it out of the House of Horrors that he created, and her mom spent what remained of her life locked up.

However when her mom dies in prison and leaves Lex and her siblings the family home, she is unable to run away from her past any longer. Along with Evie, her sister, Lex intends to transform the home into a force for good. However first she has to come to terms with her siblings. And with the childhood that they all shared.

What starts as a propulsive story about survival and escape soon becomes a captivating psychological family tale about the shifting alliances and betrayals of sibling relationships. And about the secrets that our siblings keep, both from themselves as well as one another. Who have each one of these siblings actually become? How do their memories galvanize or defy Lex’s own? While she pins each of her siblings down to agreeing to her family’s last act, she finds how potent the spell of their shared family mythology is, and just who among them remains within its thrall and who has actually broken free of it all.

This is the story of one young girl that escapes from her captivity, just not from the secrets which shadow the rest of her life.

Readers found this to be remarkably intense, breathtaking, and a dark story. This is not a gripping mystery, but a soul crusher of a survival story and the aftermaths of traumatic experiences. It examines how these characters survived their childhood trauma in their own ways. Abigail delivers a haunting and powerful debut novel, one that is compelling and absorbing reading, and is an extremely well written and multilayered debut novel.